The Grimrose Path

Chapter 13

The dead . . .

The thing about the dead—how best to put this? Annoying? Yes. Self-centered? Sure. A pain in the ass? Most definitely. But the worst thing about the dead?

They would not shut up.

If you could find yourself a genuine medium and that medium could cast a mental net and snare a human soul still hanging around life like a bad aftertaste—best to pack a lunch, because you were going to be there a long, long time. First they wanted to tell you why they hadn’t gone to the light, and it was usually something so piddly and insignificant that you’d roll your eyes as you ate the tuna fish sandwich you’d made for the trip. It never, contrary to ghost lore, was anything evil. If you were a murderer, you didn’t get to flit around the ether giggling insanely or something equally trite. If you were evil, hell scooped you up in a heartbeat. If your religion had a hell. If you were evil and atheist, too bad, a hell would still get you—it just wouldn’t necessarily be the Christian hell.

After they told you their big sob story, then came the messages. Tell my mother this. Tell my father that. Tell my girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, husband I love/hate them. One even demanded I tell the post office he was dead, so they could stop his mail. If they were long dead, and everyone they knew was gone as well, then they just wanted to gossip. Did they ever catch Jack the Ripper? The Beatles split up? JFK is dead? Rudolph Valentino? We won World War II? There was a World War II? Did Pet Rocks and leg warmers ever catch on? War of the Worlds was just a hoax? Damn it, I killed myself so the aliens wouldn’t get me.

It was an ordeal. The medium should have to pay a client to sit through it. It was good there were no such things as ghosts that you could see or hear or you’d be nagged by them day and night. Luckily you needed a medium and money to arrange for that irritation and eventually you could leave, slamming the door on their questions, An actor was president? The Terminator is governor? There were certain things impossible to explain to a dead soul, because you couldn’t explain them to yourself.

We stole a car. Leo’s was as dead as they came. Only an automotive medium could help that situation. Mine was lost and Griffin didn’t remember where he’d left his. Head injuries will do that . . . an hour to even days before the smack to the cranium, was gone, maybe forever. When we found a suitable car and it came to the actual stealing part, Zeke unexpectedly balked.

“Stealing is wrong.” He folded his arms in the strip club’s parking lot. The club was three blocks down from the bar. They say don’t piss where you live, but I was in a hurry. This was convenient and quick and I was all about both at the moment. “It’s a rule. Another rule.”

Great. When we could least afford it, Old Testament Zeke was back, somewhat recovered from Griffin’s disappearance. “Didn’t you steal a car to go look for Griffin?” I asked, bending down to take a closer look at the door. How you broke into a car depended on when it was made, if it had an alarm system, if getting in without the key remote meant it would lock up the steering column, and, last but not least—I reached over and opened the door—if it was locked. Yet another good deed on my part. This guy wouldn’t forget to lock his car again. The keys were in the ignition too. I liked convenient, but this wasn’t fun at all.

“Yeah, but rules don’t apply if it’s Griffin.” That was Zeke reasoning for you and I didn’t fault him for it. “When it’s not for Griffin, stealing is wrong.”

“Fair enough. But if the entire world is taken over by Cronus, there’s no telling what will happen to Griffin, and that’s why we’re stealing a car.” I would’ve gone for the good-intentions excuse, but that wasn’t the path to Hell, as they said. It was an express train if you didn’t know what you were doing. Get out your ice skates, because it was a slippery slope if ever there was one. Not to mention I’d seen Griffin literally bang his head against a tabletop at Trixsta trying to get the concept across. Zeke wasn’t ready for good intentions versus future bad outcomes. He was still working on good intentions versus immediate bad outcomes. It was a complicated theory to grasp. I wasn’t completely positive I had the hang of it yet, although it didn’t stop me from a whole lot of practice to prove that theorem.

“So don’t think of it as stealing to save the world. Think of it as stealing to save me.” Griffin was already climbing into the back to lie flat with knees up to make sure all of him fit. It was pain-pill time from the looks of it. I was still stiff and sore, but Griffin didn’t look like someone had taken just one baseball bat to his face and head, but rather two or three.

Zeke didn’t seem completely convinced, but he got into the passenger seat. “I’ll have to think about it.” He had a bottle of water with him, which was unusual for him. He preferred his drinks to jack him up on sugar and caffeine—as if he needed more jacking up. He held the bottle over his shoulder to Griffin. He’d need it to wash down his pills. I’d seen Zeke walk into the bar wearing two different shoes before, but his guns were always immaculately clean, and he always had what Griffin needed.

Leo was the same. He never forgot my birthday; he never let me down. My brother had never remembered my birthday and stood me up more times than he turned up, but he never let me down either—not when it truly mattered. Love was love. It came in too many forms to count. . . . Sometimes it was a bushel of apples celebrating that first trick and sometimes it was as simple as a bottle of water.

“Thinking about it, that’s a good idea,” I replied as I adjusted the seat, humming, tuning the radio, and checking the mirror to make sure my hair wasn’t an advertisement for electroshock. “You should think about lying too. It’s a good way to make sure Griffin can’t ever fool you that way again.”

Swiveling in the seat, Zeke glared into the back. “Lying is wrong.”

I grinned at Griffin’s plaintive. “Are you trying to kill me? Jesus, when I bought my car, he threatened to cut out the salesman’s tongue for lying.”

“Did he?” I asked, curious, as I zipped the car out of the parking lot. I didn’t mean “Did he” as in did he actually say that. I meant “did he” as in did he go ahead and cut out the man’s tongue. With Zeke, there really was no predicting how that had ended up.

“He settled for washing the guy’s mouth out with a urinal cake. It was not a pretty sight.” I heard the rattle of a pill bottle and the slosh of water. “Zeke, you are not washing out my mouth with any kind of soap, you understand?”

“I understand.” Zeke faced forward again, his voice placid. “I’m not putting anything in your mouth for a long time. Very long. Months. And vice versa.” He whispered an aside to me. “Is that an appropriate punishment?” Zeke didn’t often ask. He almost always knew exactly what punishment should be doled out . . . in his mind. Unfortunately, he hadn’t reached the fifty-fifty mark on being correct yet, but Griffin was different. If ever he was tempted to let someone off with a warning, it would be Griffin, but, in this case, Griffin needed more than a warning, considerably more. He had to learn.

“Perfectly.” I tossed a phone book onto his lap. “Stick by your guns on it too. If anything will teach Griffin or any man a lesson, no sex is it. Now look up mediums for me. There’re enough of them in Vegas—one has to be the real deal.”

We drove past address after address. I didn’t have to stop the car and check them out face-to-face. I was human, but I had enough of a tiny speck of trickster left in me to detect the genuine article—they pinged on my shield the same as telepaths and empaths. I drove past their places of business. Hovels of business. Séance/meth labs of business. Sometimes three combined into one. As we moved from one to another, Zeke had turned the tables on Griffin. I’d told him in the hospital it was his time to be the student, and I wasn’t wrong. Zeke was taking him to school and educating him old style.

“Okay, think another lie at me,” he demanded as he kept thumbing through the yellow pages. “Hurry up. I have to get this right.”

Griffin groaned. “We’ve been at this for almost an hour.”

“And I haven’t gotten it right yet. I have to be able to tell. I have to see through them. Lie to me again.” Licking thumb, turning page. “Trixa, West Sahara. Griffin, go on. Lie.”

“Isn’t it enough to promise I’ll never lie again?” Griffin sat up, the lines in his forehead now eased, his pain pills having kicked in. More than contrite, more than humbled, he affirmed, “Because I never will. Whether I think it’s for your own good or to prove myself, no matter what the reason, I will never lie to you again.”

Zeke’s gaze slid toward the back. “You mean it?”

“I mean it. I won’t do that again. If you want to punch me for doing it to begin with, I don’t blame you, and I won’t lift a hand to stop you.” Griffin was sincere, almost heartbreakingly so—his hair, smelling of my shampoo today, hanging forward, his face set and solemn. He had seen the error of his ways, and he was man enough not only to admit it, but to never repeat that mistake. He wouldn’t leave Zeke in the dark, accidentally or not, again. It was a moment of such truth that you could almost pluck it from the air like a lazily flying butterfly. Gloriously bright. Real enough to touch.

“Yeah, that’s sweet. You’re like a prom date, you’re so sweet.” Zeke was eyes forward again and back at the page turning. “Lie. Now.”

And I thought I was skeptical. I swung the car onto West Sahara as Griffin gave in and snapped, “Fine. You can cook. You help me with the laundry. You love thy neighbor. I’ve had better sex than with you.”

“You’re not trying at all, are you?” Zeke said with disdain.

I cut the lesson short, my audience part of it—which was too bad as it was distracting me from thinking about Cronus making Armageddon look like a toddler play-date. I pulled the car into one of three parking spots by a cracked-stucco one-story building with one profoundly dead dwarf palm planted by the door. “This is it. Only damn real medium in Vegas apparently.” I could feel him or her, bouncing off my radar. “A black thumb and can talk to the dead. It makes sense. You two can stay in the car. You’re having too much fun. I don’t want to break that up.”

At first Griffin looked as abandoned as a five-year-old his first day of school—not a good look for a grown man. Then he frowned darkly in a manner most certainly not prom-date sweet. He regretted what he’d done to Zeke and still did, but me? The regret was fading fast in the face of being the victim of the newly patented Zeke tutorial. I slammed the car door and tapped the back window just as you weren’t supposed to do on fish tanks. “Live and learn, sugar. Lie and learn too.” I heard the locks snick fast, trapping Griffin inside. Zeke’s grin was as dark as his partner’s frown. Ah, for the ability to be in two places at once.

I gave up on my voyeuristic wishes and walked to the glass door and opened it. There was no old-fashioned tinkle of bells but there was the smell of burning sage. Someone was cleaning out the bad mojo or thought they were. Burning sage was an old custom and who was I to say it didn’t scrub out the invisible stain of foul intentions, but I did know it had never kept me out of a building or a village, and my intentions? That all depended on whom they were focused on.

I also smelled dog. Lots and lots of dog. A truly massive amount of doggy odor overpowering the sage.

The office was one small room but with very little furniture, making it seem roomier than it was. There were two chairs against one wall and a tiny round table in the middle. Opposite the wall the chairs were parked against was the Dog Wall. I wasn’t terribly surprised. There were at least thirty pictures of dogs. If you studied them, you’d see they boiled down to about six dogs. There was a gray-muzzled hound, a mutt (I had a soft spot for mutts) with a small head and big fat belly, a cocker spaniel with about four teeth left and the inability to keep its tongue in its mouth, a three-legged Siberian husky, a Chihuahua with an underbite (if there were hellhounds, Chihuahuas would be fighting for the job), and a German shepherd. I hoped the last wasn’t the one I’d tried to pick up while drunk in New York. Werewolves versus German shepherds—add a few gallons of alcohol and it was a mistake anyone could make—even another werewolf.

“I guess you see why they call me the dog lady.”

I’d heard the flush from behind a door and was already facing her when she came out. Her hands were pink from the recent washing and she had enough dog hair on the sweater she was wearing to have knit a second one and had enough left over for matching mittens. “Someone has to be the dog lady on your block. Why not you?” I had no problem with it. I liked dogs. I’d been a dog once or twice. Dogs were good people. Furry, but good people.

Her eyes were sharp behind bifocals. “That’s very true, young lady, if a bit slippery of tongue. Pull up a chair.” With her tightly permed short gray hair, she could’ve counted as a seventh dog herself, an intelligent poodle who might or might not nip you if she thought you deserved it. Rolling her wheelchair up to the table, she reached into a flower-patterned bag that hung from the armrest. It looked as if it ought to hold yarn and knitting needles, but it wasn’t a half-completed scarf she pulled out. No, it was a .357 Magnum to be laid on the table. “Nothing personal, dear. But I’ve been robbed once. I won’t be robbed again.”

“No problem, ma’am.” I pulled the chair up to the table and sat down. “I can honestly say I feel right at home.” Guns and dogs, so far she was fine by me.

“Good. Then everything is right as rain. I don’t believe in dragging things out. . . .” She lifted her eyebrows in inquiry and I hastily provided my name. “Ms. Trixa. I had a schnauzer named Trixie once. Good girl. Lived to be sixteen. Became a little senile in her old age and started doing her business in the bathtub, which is an annoying chore. Scrubbing the bathtub every day with bleach, but that’s neither here nor there. I’m Mrs. Smith. You may call me Mrs. Smith, and I’ll go ahead and tell you up front that whoever you want to talk to might not be around—probably won’t be around—but there are no refunds. If I call for them and they’ve already gone on to their heavenly reward, you’re still out two hundred bucks, Trixie, and don’t be whining to me about it. Think of me as a phone call. Whether that person you’re calling is home or not, you still have to pay for that call.” A plump pink palm presented itself. “And that was two hundred, Trixie.”

I started to correct her on the name, a pooping-in-the-bathtub schnauzer not the role model I longed to be connected to, but realistically, I’d been labeled worse. I put four fifties into her hand. “Now, I’d like to—”

She stopped me in my verbal tracks. “And don’t be asking me to talk to Elvis or any of that nonsense either. He’s not there. And anyone else famous who is, well, they’ll drive you to tears and medication with their sobbing all over the place with what they’ve lost and who wronged them and whom they wronged. It’s nothing but ego masturbation, Trixie, and I don’t have the patience for it.”

I gave a wary nod, beginning to lean away from the warm feeling that the guns and dogs had engendered. I hoped Elvis had moved on and Eli had been lying when he said he’d eaten him, but more than that, I hoped the woman let me finish a sentence. I had a mouth on me, yes, I did, and not being able to get a word in . . . That didn’t happen often. “No, no Elvis. I just want—”

“Don’t be expecting some sort of light show either. You want some two-bit magic, you have the whole strip to choose from. I talk to the dead. I don’t set off fire-crackers and crank up the dry ice machine.” She picked one hair off her sweater—one hair out of hundreds—and let it drift to the floor. “Well, Trixie, girl, let’s get going. I don’t have all day to waste on your dithering. Who is it you want to talk to?”

“Anybody,” I said quickly before her lips, covered in a thick coating of bubblegum pink lipstick, could part again. “Anybody at all. Can you just send out a general notice? ‘Dead person wanted. Big balls required.’” Back up went her eyebrows. “Or brave. Brave would get the point across. This is less of a chat and more of a job interview.”

“A job interview. I have to say, missy, even my Trixie was smarter than that. The dead can’t do anything but talk. They can’t haunt your ex-boyfriends, of which I’m sure you have more than a few. Young people these days. We always said why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free, but nowadays, you’re squirting your udder at every man who passes by. Girls calling boys. Women calling men. It’s disgraceful. My neighbors are into that bisexual, couple-swapping, orgy thing. ‘Try’-sexual if you ask me, ’cause they’ll try anyone, do any type of perversion. They leave their blinds open a little and I see what goes on.”

I bet she did. All night long, armed with binoculars and popcorn. I’m a patient person . . . when patience is called for. When it will actually benefit you. This was not one of those times. I snatched up her gun before her hand had more than a chance to twitch toward it. I emptied the cylinder—the bullets rolling on the table like dice in a game of craps—smacked it back down on the table, and snapped, “Dead person. Big balls. Now.”

She swallowed, her head suddenly bobbing from palsy. “Oh Lord. Oh me. I’m doing the best I can, dear. There’s no reason to get so snippy.” And damn if she wasn’t edging her hand back toward that flowered bag again. What did she have in there now? Pepper spray? A stun gun? A cattle prod? Who knew? Who didn’t want to know? Me.

I grabbed both of her hands and placed them firmly on the table. I didn’t hurt her. She was old, she was frail, and, more honestly, she was the only medium I’d found. I needed her. “Dead person. Go.”

This time she gave in to the inevitable, although I heard the annoyed click of her dentures against each other, and closed her eyes while mumbling under her breath. Whether the mumbling was cursing at me or calling out to the spirit world, I didn’t care. I just wanted my dead person. I couldn’t talk to my brother. Human mediums can’t reach the païen and there are no païen mediums. We don’t linger like humans sometimes do. Kimano was gone, to one of our better heavens, I knew. He deserved no less. It didn’t change the fact I would’ve given almost anything to talk to him again.

Someday. When my time was up and it was time to fall so another trickster could rise, then I would see him again . . . if I had to search every heaven in existence. And I would. I would feel his hand in mine again. Rough and warm. My family, and I wouldn’t lose him, not for good.

“Trixa.”

I exhaled, annoyed. “Mrs. Smith, I don’t have the time or the patience for this. Don’t make me teach you a lesson about peeping perverts and bad neighbors, because it’s awfully tempting. Just do the job I hired you to do.”

The eyes, magnified by the bifocals, blinked. “Trixa, it’s me. Anna. Rosanna.” The pink lips curved in a shy smile. “Remember? With Sir Pickles?” She blinked again. “One of the Roses.” The Rose. The one for whom I’d pulled the rug out from under Hell itself. “We know what you did for us. I know what you did for me. Tell me what you need. I want to know how can I pay you back, how I can thank you. How can I save you like you saved me?”

Sweet, shy Anna. She’d hung around, not welcome in the biblical Heaven because of the deal she’d made and not ready to pick a païen heaven, because of me. She’d known what was going on once she was freed of Hell. She had known about Cronus. The dead knew a good deal more than demons or angels if you asked them the right questions. She’d waited in case I needed help. She wouldn’t have been the first one I’d thought of when I thought balls, but she had them all the same. She had determination and she thought she had a duty—to thank me. In all my trickster days I think it might’ve been the first thank-you I’d ever received.

“Anna.” I gripped the hands I held in mine. “Little Anna, I’m grateful, but I don’t think this is something you will want to do. It’s dangerous, even to the dead. And it’s terrifying—especially to the dead.”

The brightness in her eyes was twice what it had been when she’d first come to me. “I lost my face, my life, my soul, and I stepped in front of a bus.” The smile was less shy now. It was confident, daring, adventurous, and what Anna should have always been if her life hadn’t changed so quickly. “I think I have a résumé in dangerous and terrifying.”

“So you’re James Bond now, are you?” I asked fondly.

“Better,” she said promptly. “I won’t stop and have sex with every woman I see on the way.”

“Annie-girl, you are so worth it. Screwing Hell. Freeing all the Roses. You were most certainly worth it all. You are my poster girl of the year.”

Her hands—in reality the dog lady’s hands, but Anna’s for the moment—shook mine playfully. “Then tell me. How can I help you?”

I told her, and to her credit she didn’t flinch, not once. Not when I told her where I needed her to go, how difficult it was to get in, and how far more difficult it was to get out. I hoped dropping my name and the reason behind what I needed should be enough to help her pass whoever remained there, but I told her truthfully that I couldn’t guarantee it.

She tugged me across the table and kissed me on the cheek. “We’ll see. I only wish I had Sir Pickles with me. There isn’t anything alive or dead that’s not afraid of a smack from him. And when I’m done, where will I go?”

“Anywhere you want. We have more heavens than stars in the sky. Tell them I sent you, and I think you’ll find one you like. Ask for my brother, Kimano, when you knock at the doors. I know you’ll like him. All the girls do.”

The pink smile widened and then, the same as a rainbow-sheened soap bubble popping under your curious finger, she was gone. Anna was gone and I was left with the much less amiable dog lady. I didn’t blame that schnauzer at all for making a toilet out of her bathtub. She was not the most pleasant or reasonable of people. If we lived someplace colder, she’d no doubt force the dogs into ridiculous little sweaters or raincoats. Looking at the pictures on the wall again, now every canine face seemed to be pleading, help us. She brushes our teeth four times a day. She wheels us out in the yard and tries to wipe our asses with toilet paper when we go.

She did feed them though. That was something, every one of them fat and sassy on the wall of fame. It was better than the pound and near-certain death. I couldn’t swat her for embarrassing dogs. But for being rude and peeping at her neighbors, I’d put that on the back burner.

“Thank you, Mrs. Smith. Despite yourself, you were helpful. And, please, the dogs don’t care if it’s one ply or two. They’d prefer you didn’t wipe their furry butts at all.”

“You ungrateful, pushy little bitch. Crazy too—ought to be locked up in the nuthouse with your talk of rivers in Hell. No crazy is killing or robbing me—you’ll see that right here and now.” I’d let go of her hands, and she was scooping up the bullets on the table. Her fingers were as nimble as those of a blackjack dealer, which was why I took her gun with me.

“I’ll leave it outside the door. Don’t shoot your mail-man.” I was passing through the doorway when I felt something hit the back of my head hard. A bullet fell to my feet and rolled across the floor. The hell with the gun, she’d started throwing bullets at me. I rubbed the stinging on my scalp and closed the door behind me in time to hear another one clink against the glass. With that arm she should’ve been pitching in the World Series. I put the .357 down on the concrete. She took very good care of her dogs. If I killed her, who would feed and love them?

I massaged my head again. Leo liked dogs. Tempting, tempting, but no. If being a bitch merited death, I’d be notching my gun belt every day. If I had a gun belt. Damn it, that stung. Human pain, yet another thing I could do without in the whole being-human realm. Their nervous system was far too fine-tuned, ridiculously sensitive. In other forms I’d had my limbs broken, my abdomen clawed open, and, on one memorable occasion, had a lung ripped completely out of my body and none of it equaled one menstrual period of the new and human Trixa Iktomi. That might be a small exaggeration, but it wasn’t that far from the truth.

I knocked on the window of the stolen car and the locks snicked open. Sliding into the driver’s seat, I took in the scenario. Griffin had his arm around Zeke’s neck from behind in a classic choke hold. “Did the lesson take a turn for the worse?”

Zeke was tuning the radio. “He won’t go through with it,” he said without the hoarseness or lack of consciousness the arm across his throat should’ve produced. “He couldn’t choke out a Christmas elf with this hold.”

“But I want to. I very much want to,” Griffin countered. The hard line of his arm, the clenched teeth, the face flushed with aggravation; it all said it was true, but . . .

“Ha,” his partner gloated, “now that’s a lie. I can feel it. I can see it. It’s purple. When you lie, I see purple.” Closing his eyes to concentrate on the color, he then opened them again and focused back to the radio. “Okay. You can nap now. You won’t ever be able to lie to me again, not even for my own good.” Griffin’s jaw, if anything, went tighter, but he let Zeke go, then lay back down in the seat. Being Zeke’s student would give anyone a headache, concussion or not.

In a way, it was too bad. Griffin had chosen the wrong thing to lie to Zeke about, but at the end of the day you sometimes needed someone to lie to you, because some days the truth was too unpleasant, too depressing to hear. A good example would be Eli, carrying the heat of Hell with him, materializing beside the car, tearing the door off to throw into the street, and snarling, “He needs four more wings. Four, and then playing Where’s Waldo is goddamn over. He’ll have an X marks the spot to Lucifer. Your plan, if you have one, better be in fucking motion, because the world is about to come to an end.

“All of them.”